In his extraordinary essay ‘The Metaphysical Studio’, Phillip Zarrilli advocated for the actor's psychophysical exploration of risky uncertainties and unknown possibilities in the ‘spatio-temporal realm between presence and absence, between “what is” and “what is not” – this liminal realm between’. It was typical of Zarrilli that when he received confirmation that his cancer had returned for the third and final time, he both responded pragmatically and perceived the experience as a philosophically interesting inhabitation of ‘that liminal place between’. Just as ‘The Metaphysical Studio’ emphasizes the actor's investigation of ‘the relationship between that “self” and “others” – the other “selves” that inhabit me; those I might wish to inhabit; the other as “Character”; the interpersonal you-as-other;’ it was also typical that Zarrilli sought to take care of many of the ‘others’ connected with him. These others included a sprawling global training community of students, practitioners and scholars. In a final video call alongside his life and work collaborator Kaite O'Reilly and with more than thirty-five students from around the world who had studied his intercultural performer training at the University of Exeter, Zarrilli stressed, ‘it's never about me, it's always about you’. This stress on ‘you’ was rooted in his emphasis on participants gaining ownership of the training and assimilating it into their own practice, along with a core focus on the other and the collective. During the call, Zarrilli signalled the importance of consistently working within the studio and performance space on strong interpersonal relationships, which ‘can arise when people are learning how to be generous with their energy, with what they can give, with how they can be present to each other. And again, we need more of that in the world’. It is unsurprising that those who participated in Zarrilli's training experienced how that focus on intersubjectivity developed a joyful international and intergenerational community, underpinned by politicized intentions around accessibility, generous group awareness, an ethics of care, and an ability to share the space, which could also be carried into the wider world.

As an undergraduate student in Birmingham in the early 1990s, I spent a lot of time in the stacks in the library where I had discovered, through back issues of TDR for the most part, something called ‘performance studies’. It didn't really figure on our curriculum, but having become duly exposed to Richard Foreman scripts, photographs of Annie Sprinkle shows and various essays on ritual, I wished like hell that it did. It was this that led me to a book, By Means of Performance, edited by Richard Schechner and Willa Appel. One chapter in particular floored me completely. Entitled ‘What Does It Mean to “Become the Character”: Power, Presence and Transcendence in Asian In-Body Disciplines of Practice’, it combined a deep knowledge of the practices it discussed that could only have come from doing them in depth, with a level of philosophical and ethnographic detail that made tangible, material sense of the apparently esoteric premise of its title. The chapter was Phillip's, and his great gift as both teacher and scholar was always that ability to place the relationship between ‘the doer and the thing done’ at the heart of things. This is, of course, a key tenet of the American pragmatist tradition (the phrase is John Dewey's, I believe, although I often heard Phillip make use of it) and I don't think he would object to me aligning him with it.

There are recurring themes in Zarrilli's long career of writing about the processes of performance, and his most recent book (Toward) A Phenomenology of Acting (2020) brings together these concerns in what could be seen as a culmination of his life's work – dissolving the boundaries between the studio, the stage and the theorization of these processes. We could look briefly over the entirety of his written contribution to theatre research – from his meticulous studies of kalaripayattu and kathakali dance drama, to his groundbreaking edited collection Acting (Re)considered and the innovative co-authored Theatre Histories to his monograph Psychophysical Acting (which won the ATHE Outstanding Book of the Year Award), as well as numerous other reflections on training and performance.

When I last heard from Phillip Zarrilli in August 2019, he was going through the page proofs of what would be his final monograph, (Toward) A Phenomenology of Acting. He and I had been in regular contact with each other while writing books about theatre phenomenology; he from the performer and director's point of view, and I from the spectator's. As it turned out, his book came out a year after mine did, and by the time I was able to read it I had lost the chance to tell him how good I thought it was.

It is going to take some time for me to fully accept that Phillip Zarrilli is no more. Phillip, as I knew him as a friend, continues to live in my mind's eye with memories of ceaseless conversations, exchanges of letters and interactions in different parts of the world. Just three months before his death on 28 April 2020, we had met in Kerala, his second home, in the town of Kunnamkulam, where we had watched a high-voltage, virtuoso performance of the Kathakali play Duryodhanavadham (The Killing of Duryodhana) by the Kerala Kalamandalam troupe, which we thoroughly relished. I have rarely seen Phillip more relaxed and happy as I remember him in Kunnamkulam. While he was, in all probability, aware that this was going to be his last trip to Kerala, he was making the most of it, reminding us that he had come full circle by returning to the state which had nurtured his initiation into the martial arts tradition of kalarippayyattu.